1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for managing access among the devices. More particularly, the invention relates to an apparatus and method for managing access among a plurality of devices accommodated in one chassis.
2. Related Art
In recent years, the server has a lower price, and each enterprise can introduce the server relatively simply. Accordingly, each enterprise possesses a number of servers, whereby there is a growing demand for lower operation management cost of the server and space saving. Thus, the number of companies introducing a blade server system as the product for meeting such demand has grown. The blade server system is the system in which a plurality of servers or devices such as a storage are arranged at high density in one chassis (chassis).
By the way, in such system in which the plurality of servers or devices such as a storage are arranged in one chassis, the data integrity may not be ensured if the access control between these devices is appropriately performed. For example, supposing that immediately after a certain server reads data in a storage, another server overwrites data in the same storage, the data integrity may not be ensured. To avoid such a situation, the blade server system generally has a zoning function. Nowadays, an SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) has become the mainstream as the next generation interface for a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), and the zoning specifications are defined in Serial Attached SCSI-2 (SAS-2) Standard Working Draft.
In this zoning function, whether access is permitted among the SAS devices such as an SAS host bus adaptor (SAS HBA) on the blade server, a disk drive module (DDM) in the blade server system, and a RAID sub-system or SAS HBA connected to an external port in the same blade server system is decided based on a zone permission table. It is required that the setting of the zone permission table is made by the administrator, but it is very inefficient that all the zonings are manually set, easily causing a mistake.
Thus, some of the blade server systems mount a function of incorporating several kinds of zoning settings supposedly having high use frequency as the preliminary definitions to reduce a trouble or mistake in setting the zoning as much as possible.
Herein, conventionally there are various techniques for the zoning setting (e.g., refer to Japanese Patent Publication No. 2002-063063, published Feb. 28, 2002). In Japanese Patent Publication No. 2002-063063, an area in the storage device to access from the host side and a fiber channel adaptor (FCA) and a host bus adaptor (HBA) for use in gaining access to the storage device are set up in the integrated storage controls for integrally controlling the SAN, and the integrated storage controls make the storage setting, the zoning setting and the setting of the area to which access is permitted to an SAN management component of the host, a zoning setting component of the switch and a storage management component of the storage device, based on this information.